What is it about?
Writing, according to Kristeva, is an act of plagiarism. We write palimpsests on top of other writing, acknowledging implicitly that we are derivative, that our work is intertextual, borrowed, sampled, “internalised”, “bowerbirded” from other works. In my teaching of Creative Writing, I encourage students to intentionally “borrow” in this way; in my own writing, I blatantly steal. It is what writers do. How different, however, is intertextual borrowing to copying other people’s work and passing it off as your own? I will examine recent examples of writers who have been shamed and stripped of their awards because of their intertextual “borrowings”, and compare this to Kristeva’s notion of text as a “mosaic of quotations” as well as Roland Barthes’s idea of text as “a new tissue of past citations”, and explore the fine line between plagiarism, palimpsest and intertextuality.
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Why is it important?
This article explores the fine line between plagiarism, palimpsest and intertextuality. When is 'borrowing' from someone else's work 'stealing' , 'allusion' or 'bowerbirding'?
Perspectives
This paper is important in creative writing studies as it helps writers acknowledge the process of bowerbirding and how all our writing is written on top of other writing.
Dr Paul Andrew Williams
University of the Sunshine Coast
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This page is a summary of: Plagiarism, Palimpsest and Intertextuality, New Writing, May 2015, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2015.1036887.
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